United passenger attacks seatmate

Wednesday morning’s United Airlines flight from Newark to Miami, UA728, diverted to Charleston due to one passenger’s awful behavior. 45-year-old John Yurkovich is the man behind the attack on several other passengers. WCSC reports on the content of the police reports about the incident:

Yurkovich got up to use the bathroom and returned a short while later, but appeared to be agitated; at that point he became “restless” and “bounced around his seat”
Yurkovich then asked for some water from a flight attendant, and then retrieved pills from the overhead bin
Yurkovich then sat back down and began to “scream and thrash around”
Yurkovich’s seatmate held his arm up to protect himself, but ended up being struck with a closed fist on the side of his face, causing his glasses to break, and he also suffered a laceration to his ear, as the man tried to bite it off
Other passengers intervened to try and restrain the man — a second victim was struck by Yurkovich, and that may have caused a broken nose; a third victim was punched in the head as well
At this point other passengers helped to restrain Yurkovich, and a physician even administered a shot of Benadryl in the man’s butt to help sedate him
When police officers boarded the plane in Charleston, they found Yurkovich face down on the floor of the aircraft being restrained with zip ties and belts — he had his hands behind his back, and his face was covered by a shirt.